Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Walker Introduces Third Straight Illegal Budget

Federal law requires that every state, county and municipality has a balanced budget.

For his final two years as Milwaukee County Executive, Scott Walker has flagrantly violated that law by introducing and passing illegal budgets.  They were illegal as that they had the expectations of certain concessions from the unions which he never even proposed at the negotiation table, much less successfully obtained.

On Tuesday, in a Capitol Building which he had blocked off to the people of Wisconsin, in front of a group of lackeys that were allegedly smuggled in to the building through the tunnel system, Walker pretended to be the Beloved Leader as he presented his budget.  As you can imagine, unless you've been drinking from the Koch's teapot, the budget is an abomination.

But not only is it an abomination, but like his last two county budgets, it is illegal, based on a false assumption of savings:
The Governor believes that the amount state and local government employees pay toward their pension and health insurance benefits should be comparable to those paid by private sector workers and government employees in other states.  Currently, state, school district and municipal employees that are members of the Wisconsin Retirement System generally pay little or nothing toward their pensions.  Many private sector companies do not even offer a defined benefit plan any longer and for those that do offer a retirement plan, an employee contribution equal to at least 5 percent of their wages is common.  At the state level, employees on average pay 6 percent of the health insurance premium under current law. Based on national data from the Kaiser Foundation, the percent of health insurance premium paid by private sector employees ranges from 20 percent to 30 percent.

As such, the budget repair bill contained the following provisions that increase state and local employee contributions towards pension and health insurance costs.  The annualized savings related to those modifications have been included in the budget bill.  The benefit to the general fund is approximately $300 million over the biennium.
As anyone who hasn't been living under a rock knows, those saving just aren't real.

With yet another heartfelt thank you to the heroic Wisconsin 14, who fled with nothing but the clothes on their back, the union busting, power-grabbing, unconstitutional and utterly misnamed "Budget Repair Bill" has never been passed, and one can only hope and pray that it never will be.

Nor have these concessions been negotiated.  The unions publicly capitulated to the financial demands that Walker had set forth, using the people's rights as hostages, but Walker refused to negotiate.  He was going for it all or bust.

We can add this to the list of complaints piling up against Walker, along with his illegal use of state troopers to round up members of the opposing political party, plotting to use provocateurs to disrupt and discredit the peaceful protesters that have been in Madison for more than two weeks and ignoring a court order to open the Capitol Building to the public.

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